Tech
Check out the pitch deck that Kangarootime used to raise $26 million to help daycare centers manage everyday tasks
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- Kangarootime offers software to daycare centers to manage their administrative tasks in one hub.
- Founder Scott Wayman came up with the idea after getting custody of his youngest brother.
- It just raised a $26 million Series B round, bringing its total funding to nearly $36 million.
Kangarootime, a Buffalo, NY-based startup developing software for daycare and early childhood education centers to manage tasks like billing, attendance, and activity schedules, was officially founded in 2015.
But according to founder Scott Wayman, the origins of Kangarootime date back to 2001, when he found out he was going to gain custody of his little brother, Chase. As he started looking for daycare centers and summer activity programs for Chase to attend while he was at work, Wayman saw that many of these programs’ operations departments were not the most organized.
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“The owners were just great, wonderful folks that were obsessed with building bodies, souls, and minds, but they struggled as business people,” he said. “Being a business person myself, I offered to help them build out a point-of-sale system, something to help them collect payments, and compile all their invoices.”
The website that Wayman built for his brother’s day care center became the prototype for what would eventually become Kangarootime, which Wayman came back to after a long career detour in medical and healthcare sales. After a friend approached him with an offer to pick the startup back up in 2015, Wayman realized that the patient portal experience for healthcare centers would work well as a model for daycare and early childhood education centers.
Kangarootime got an early boost in funding by relocating from Los Angeles to Buffalo, NY to participate in the 43North accelerator in 2017, which funds and workshops startups in the Buffalo metro area. It has since attracted the attention of investors like Education Growth Partners, who signed on to lead the startup’s latest $26 million Series B round. Kangarootime has raised $35.9 million in total funding to date, according to a spokesperson.
These days, Kangarootime can accomplish four main tasks for day care centers, says Wayman: automate the business of childcare, like billing and supplies, automate the classroom to help teachers manage check ups and child behavior, update parents on their child’s progress in the classroom, and help child care centers scale their operations at multiple locations.
“Teachers in early education classrooms, they are oversubscribed systemically—if you shadow a day in the life of an early education teacher, their lives are really rough,” said Wayman. “We try to make their lives super easy with prompts and scheduling. We’d like to say we make them ten times as fast as they would be on paper.”
Check out Kangarootime’s pitch deck that it used to raise $26 million in funding for automating tasks at daycare and early childhood education centers: